The present invention relates to an improved method of and apparatus for transferring a card having information recording material thereon along a path to a rotational reference axis about which the card is held and rotated, whereby the recording material can be read and/or written on by a suitable reader and/or writer device.
Various forms of record cards, such as medical record, banking and the like, which have the capacity to store significant amounts of data in binary coded form, have been proposed. For use therewith a variety of storage media are used, for example, magnetic media, photosensitive media, integrated circuit chips and optical recording media. Of course, a variety of reading and/or writing devices for interfacing with such record media have been proposed as well.
One known card has information stored on laser recording media and such card is described generally in U.S. Pat. No. 4,500,777. Essentially, the information to be stored is converted to digital code and written as a series of micron-size pits and spaces. These pits and spaces are recorded in generally linear tracks. A reader and/or writer device for use therewith must, therefore, perform rectilinear scanning movement with respect to these data tracks. While such an optical card reader and/or writer device serves satisfactorily, it nonetheless tends to be somewhat complicated in construction and operation.
Another kind of optical record is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,501,586 wherein data is recorded onto data tracks which are segmented into arcs or raster lines across the card. Such cards may be read by a playback system, such as illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 4,090,031, wherein the card is held stationary and each track segment can be read by a corresponding set of scanning elements. While such optical card reader and/or writer devices serve satisfactorily, they nonetheless tend to be somewhat complicated in construction and operation.